Tag Archives: Donald Trump

A young Japanese American waits to be taken to an assembly center. Via Wikimedia Commons.

This Sunday marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of Executive Order 9066. Signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, the order authorized the secretary of war and military commanders to establish “exclusion zones,” which ultimately led to the internment of 110,000 Japanese Americans. The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of these actions in a series of decisions culminating in Korematsu v. United States.

We are now in the middle of a heated national debate over another executive order: “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States,” signed by President Donald J. Trump. The two orders are not the same in scope or consequence. But they do bear some similarities. Neither Executive Order 9066 nor Trump’s immigration order singles out a group of people by name. Yet both orders make possible discriminatory action.

As much as I disagree with its substance and symbolism, many of the constitutional arguments raised against Trump’s executive order strike me as unpersuasive. The order does not flagrantly overstep the bounds of executive power as they are currently understood; nor is the purported Establishment Clause challenge as obvious as some commentators have suggested. (I find Michael McConnell’s analysis of the Ninth Circuit’s opinion closest to the mark.)

But whether or not an executive order is constitutional is not the only question that can be raised about it or even necessarily the most important. The actions of our president—particularly those formalized and ritualized as executive orders—have expressive as well as legal consequences. They tell us something about who we are and who we should be as a people. From this perspective, the historical connection to Executive Order 9066 reminds us of the dangers of fear and the human toll that can too easily result from that fear. Continue reading →

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In a recent offering, “Trump Voters Are Feeling It,” New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall comments sagely on a raft of social science research on the white working- and middle-class voters who embraced Donald J. Trump as the leader who would cure America’s deep malaise—or a least their own. For the moment, according to Edsall, these former sufferers of what might be called the Great White Depression (documented by scholars like Princeton’s Nobel economist Angus Deaton, with depressing data about high rates of depression, suicide, drug and alcohol abuse) are feeling “elated”:

In a survey conducted by Pew after the election, 96 percent of those who cast votes for Trump said they were hopeful; 74 percent said they were “proud.” They were almost unanimous in their expectation that Trump will have a successful first term.

This is in itself may hardly seem surprising, and of course it is possible that these enthusiasts will feel let down if the greatness Trump promises does not improve their lives. Nevertheless, Edsall notes, evidence suggests that “just by giving voice to those in the white working class who are distrustful, alienated, and isolated from contemporary culture, Trump will provide temporary relief from the stress that these voters experience.” And if past is prologue, this relief alone may have surprisingly positive effects on their mental and physical health, and indeed on their overall morale. A study based on a survey that oversampled Hispanics and blacks after Obama’s election in 2008 found that “among African Americans, the likelihood of reporting excellent health nearly doubled, from 7 to 13 percent, and for Hispanics it nearly quadrupled, from 6 to 22 percent, although the Hispanic sample was small and less reliable.” Continue reading →

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In the 1850s, the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic Know-Nothing Party swept New England. They won local offices and gained the statehouse and almost every seat in Massachusetts’s legislature in 1854. They showed strong in Pennsylvania and New York. Many observers thought that the Know-Nothings would win the presidency—and in 1856 they even ran a candidate, former president Millard Fillmore.

And then, they disappeared. Some went back to the Jacksonian Democrats, but many aligned with the new Republican Party which offered a vision of hope and rejected the hateful messages proffered by the Know-Nothings. By 1860, the Republicans would win the presidency with a positive message. The Republicans transformed voters’ rage, hatred, and anger into an optimistic vision for the American future. And it is from their experience that I, too, have hope.

In a previous essay, written as then-candidate Donald Trump was gaining popularity, I argued that we have much to learn from the Know-Nothings. At a time when native-born white Protestants were nervous about their future and thought the political system unresponsive, Know-Nothings channeled those widespread anxieties into hostility toward Catholic immigrants. Know-Nothings in various states barred teaching foreign languages, prohibited state courts from naturalizing aliens, and attempted to limit immigrant voting through literacy tests and longer waiting periods for citizenship. Worst of all, violence broke out between Know-Nothings and their opponents. Continue reading →

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I grew up in suburban San Francisco, on a court with families of different ethnic, religious, and economic backgrounds. Our family was from India. We knew that our court had much diversity. Some on the court were Catholic. Others were of Japanese heritage. Many of our own family friends were from Pakistan and India.

But every morning, we kids gathered on different driveways to carpool together to our local public school. On New Year’s and Fourth of July, the neighbors would come together to celebrate. I remember running over to neighbors’ houses excitedly on Christmas mornings to share my new toys with my friends. One neighbor with a swimming pool would hang out a flag on the front lamp post to let us know that we could all come over and jump in the water.

Those common rituals and values sustained our diversity. It made it possible for each of our families to be different because we shared so much that was also the same. We were all American, not in some abstract way. Nor were we American because anybody can be American according to some abstract principle. We were American because we did American things together as Americans. And yet we were all so different. Those differences were not threatening, and were even celebrated, because we had so much that we shared with each other too. Continue reading →

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What happened yesterday? We just witnessed a revolution. I say that not in a metaphorical sense to mean a great political event, a turning point, or a momentous occasion. I mean it literally: Yesterday, just under a majority of the American electorate pulled off a political revolution through the electoral process, a new political regime, a new era in American history, and, necessarily, the end of the old regime. It was, without question, the most extraordinary day in modern American political history, far surpassing the election of the first black president eight years ago. And it means we live in a different nation today than we did yesterday.

Every political revolution brings new political regimes, new epistemologies, and new mythologies. Each, of course, is “new” only in qualified sense, as nothing in human culture is wholly and fully new. But, relative or not, the point of political revolutions is to establish a new form of rule, new forms of knowing, and new stories and belief systems.

In a single stunning electoral swoop yesterday, Donald Trump destroyed both the old Republican Party and the old Democratic Party. In the void he created a new Republican Party, the form of which we can only see as through a glass darkly, but which will be a powerful force in American politics for the foreseeable future. The Democratic Party, seemingly the only functioning political party in American politics but forty-eight hours ago, is now a badly wounded opposition party, one that will be as lacking in a compass as was the old Republican Party. And what Trump has done to the American political parties is soon to be done to the American federal government. It is hard to know what will result. Political revolutions are precarious, uncertain, and inherently risky and dangerous. Most fail. Most fail badly. It is impossible to know if the Trump-led revolution will last or crash, but there is no going back. The old has gone, the new has come.

The new revolutionary epistemology was portentously performed in yesterday’s events. Going into Election Day, virtually every pollster—bolstered by sophisticated, scientifically tested models and ample empirical data—had Clinton winning the election. But as the night wore on we saw a new reality emerge, one perhaps felt as a possibility by the guardians of social scientific knowledge, but one that was still a complete surprise. “Science” is now bunk, as are the projections of the mainstream media. The alternate reality of the alt-right media is now the American reality, virtual and not. The Breitbart bubble of yesterday is now the radical basis for a new American revolutionary epistemology. We will never know the same.

Finally, the mythology. It is not new, but it has an entirely new form. It is of the Great White Savior. As such, it is redemptive in narrative structure: The Great White Savior comes to save America from doom. This is why, undoubtedly, so many white evangelicals, unschooled in the deep history of their faith and unmoored from the tempering force of tradition, found in Trump a savior they could recognize. It did not matter that he was a sexual predator, a liar by any sane old regime criterion, and demonstrated no capacity for prudential judgment. The salvation myth was and is enough to win the hearts and minds not only of the religious, but of the irreligious and irreverent millions who found in Trump the demigod they had been looking for.

The revolution is here. It is not going away. Only political revolutions can change everything foundational to a society in the flash of a few hours. We just went through one. Though so many of Trump’s supporters seemed to have voted out of a longing for things past, the irony is that Trump could bring to them only something new, radically new, a new nation.

I’m not Lloyd Bentsen and didn’t know Jack Kennedy, but I do remember the Frank Sinatra theme song for the Kennedy campaign. Its original lyrics about a little old ant and silly old ram who achieved the impossible because of their “high hopes” remind me of the idealized hopes of Barack Obama’s supporters in 2008 and Donald Trump’s this year.

Both groups march to a drumbeat of hope and change, but in very different directions. Obama’s followers believed he would end the politics of racial, class, and ideological division that they felt had characterized the Bush presidency. Obama’s soaring rhetoric promised an America that was no longer red or blue but united. By contrast, Trump promises an overhaul of the body politic. His self-styled brilliance in the arts of negotiation will supposedly fix the structures of trade, immigration, and finance that favor elites and minorities over the common person (particularly if that person is white, male, and working class).

Trump’s followers hope their man will restore America, but how do they envision the restoration? Continue reading →

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After fading from the headlines in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s dissolution, Russia has begun to climb back into the American consciousness. Beginning with its 2008 conflict with Georgia, Russia’s interventions in former spheres of Soviet influence have drawn criticism from the United States and elsewhere in the West. By the time Russian President Vladimir Putin was authorizing an invasion of Ukraine and an intervention in Syria on behalf of dictator Bashar al-Assad, the percentage of Americans reporting an opinion of Russia that was mostly or very unfavorable had spiked from 27 percent in 2002 to 65 percent early this year.

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